British Library MS K90049-89 Royal 6 E ix ff. 10v-11
As he was composing the Abun Dbashmayo (“Father in Heaven”
in Aramaic), Yeshua began with Ha Shem, the Name. The Name is as close as
earthlings can come to the essence of the Deity. What should come next? “Thy
Kingdom come” says Yeshua. I have previously written about the curious
optatives in the first half of the Lord’s Prayer; now, of course, we have to
put right a noun. What is desired here is not the coming of a place or even the
transformation of a place: the word malkuth,
with the same MLK root as melech,
would be much better translated in this context as “kingship” or “reign”. May/let
Thy reign come.
Now this is a petition we can understand and wholeheartedly
support. A dear friend of mine is always sad, sorry and frustrated that God, in
His omnipotence, does not one day simply appear on all TV stations and all
social media at once, say “Playtime over, you little horrors!” and close the
whole show of our sorry planet down. And I suspect that many people would be in
more-or-less agreement with that. Let Him take over. Let Him wipe out poverty
and sickness and misery in one mighty stroke, and magically transform our
squabbling messy billions into the sweet harmonious societas we think He must have had in mind when He created us. Thy reign come – please! Ours has made such a spectacular mess of
things; do please take over!
God, of course, softly but definitively says “No” to that.
That frustrates us, and it makes us try to work out why. Why does God let all
the evil in the world happen, why does He not set up his reign once and for
all, now? There are two reasons, which I’ve mentioned here before. In the first
place, God does not, I think, micromanage our planet. Not a sparrow falls, says
Yeshua, but God sees it; but He doesn’t stop it falling. Shit happens.
Earthquakes happen. Hurricanes happen. Secondly, God’s omnipotence has only one
limit but it is huge: He cannot go against His own nature. Since his nature is
love, and since love by its nature implies freedom, He cannot force us to love
Him back, or love our neighbour. Auschwitz happens. And God weeps burning
cosmic tears as he takes the souls of massacred innocents to Himself.
Having thus understood why he does not impose his reign, we
may still ask why, then, we can and should beg for it to come? I imagine,
again, Yeshua meditating on this, perhaps at night on a Nazareth rooftop, and
coming gradually to the realisation that our prayer for God’s reign to come
means that we are asking for, begging for, his institution as our Ruler, the
ruler of our land, of our polis, of
our oikos, of our collective and
individual lives. And this is not something God will do on his own: rather, it
is we who will nominate and install Him – evidently through His grace, through
His Holy Spirit. If we ask Him – and in so far as we ask Him – He will, as he
has promised, come and dwell with us, in us. So the prayer is turned back on
us: it is our praying, our asking, our begging, that will make His reign come.
This is true both individually and collectively. If I ask
Him with all my heart and soul and mind and strength to rule me, He will,
although it may take time; if we, “We
the People”, so far get our shit together that we ask him unitedly and
insistently and with our whole collective heart and mind and soul and strength
to rule us, He will. Of course, as we even begin to think about the possibility
we see how staggeringly unlikely is such a unanimity. But maybe it has to start
with small collectivities: an oikos,
a household or family; a club; a group of friends; a charitable institution;
even a political party. The petition “Thy reign come” is a compass that gives
direction to out hope, a sense to our work in the world, and a course to our
praying.
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